1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and a method for temporary storage device of image-encoding data. Particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for temporary storage of image-encoding data that utilize two temporary data storages with macroblock row sizes as the storage size basis.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As digital cameras, webcams, and other related digital imaging devices become more widespread, consumer demand for digital devices with higher resolution quality has also increased. Fierce market competition has made price a key factor in determining the potential competitiveness of each such related products. Besides purely light sensing hardware devices and other related light sensing electronic components, image encoding associated with hardware and software has also become a core technology of digital imaging devices.
As consumer demands for imaging resolution become increasingly stringent, technology and related skills for high resolution image encoding have become a focal point of concern for consumers. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a conventional image encoding system. As shown in FIG. 1, in the conventional image encoding system, the sensing device 1 converts detected light signals into electronic signals with frame units. Each frame (referred to as current frame) is written into a temporary storage device 2 to be read by an encoding device 3, wherein the temporary storage device 2 may be a Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) or any other type of storage device. The encoding device 3 reads and encodes from the temporary storage device 2 the frames into a digital image data corresponding to a specific format (e.g. H.264). The sensing device and the encoding device alternately read from and write into the two temporary storage devices (referred to as ping pong temporary storage devices), wherein each temporary storage device has a capacity equal to the size of one frame.
However, as resolution quality increases, the size of each frame has also increased to exceed the Megabyte size threshold. As a result, the conventional image encoding system would have to accordingly have a pair of correspondingly large temporary storage devices. On one hand, more temporary storage space and hardware resources of related electronic addressing circuits would be required, while on the other hand, even more time would be wasted to read from and write into the temporary storage devices.